It grew very warm during the evening and windy. By bedtime there was a
hot, lifeless gale blowing from the southeast. Now and then the moon
shone out brightly through the smother of tearing clouds, and was
visible for a moment in all her glory, only to be submerged the next
moment and blotted out. About two o'clock single raindrops began to
splash so loudly on the veranda roof just outside my window that the
noise waked me; after that I only slept fitfully, and my ears were
never free from the loud roaring of the tropic rain that began
presently to fall upon Aiken. I dreamed that somebody had stolen the
Great Lakes and while being hotly pursued had dropped them. All day it
rained like that, and all the following night, and only let up a little
the afternoon of the second day. I got into an oilskin then and walked
out to the Fultons'.
Theirs was a nervous household. Jock and Hurry confined indoors for
nearly two days had had too little exercise and too many good things to
eat. They were quite cross and irrepressible. John had the fidgets.
He couldn't even stay in the same room for more than a minute, and he
wouldn't even try sitting down for a change. Lucy had had to give up
at least a dozen things that required dry weather and sunshine. She
seemed to take the rain as something directed particularly against
herself by malicious persons. Evelyn, also cross and nervous, was on
the point of retiring to her own room to write letters. Just then
Dawson Cooper telephoned to know if she cared to take a little walk in
the rain and she accepted with alacrity.
"It's gotten so that he only has to whistle," said Lucy petulantly,
when Evelyn had gone. "I think she's made up her mind to be landed."
Fulton came and went. Every now and then he dropped on the piano-stool
for a few moments and made the instrument roar and thunder; once he
played something peaceful and sad and even, in which one voice with
tears in it ran away from another.
The piano was in the next room, and whenever it began to sound, Lucy
dropped her work into her lap and listened. At such time she had an
alert, startled look. She resembled a fawn when it hears a stick snap
in the forest.
We heard him leave the piano, cross the hall and go into the
dining-room.
"He's hardly touched his piano in years," said Lucy. "But now he's at
it in fits and starts from morning till night. Night before last when
the rain began he got up and went down in his bare feet and played for
hours. I had to fetch him and make him come back to bed."
Then she seemed to feel that an explanation was necessary. She bent
rosily over the work, and said: "We don't want the servants to know."
Again the piano began to ripple and thunder. Again we heard John go
into the dining-room.